It’s always tempting to say riot grrrl is having a revival or a moment, given that it’s been Having a Moment for almost two decades. But the moment has recently intensified. After a steady drip of histories and love-notes to the genre-- plus the de facto canonization that time and increased press mentions bring-- comes a primary resource: this year’s The Riot Grrrl Collection, an anthology of zines, many obscure, from New York University’s Fales collection and bandmate donations. There's also a touring film, Sini Anderson’s Kathleen Hanna documentary The Punk Singer (not even the first Bikini Kill documentary), which dazzled SXSW last March. And then there's the extramusical zeitgeist, the seemingly weekly spurts of feminist backlash and backlash-to-the-backlash, the nostalgia-industrial complex that’s got everyone loving everything 1990s, and the Russian band Pussy Riot putting their forebears back into the headlines by becoming a cause célèbre.
What there hasn’t been is new music from Hanna, the person at the nucleus of it all. There’s a reason for that: She was diagnosed with long-progressed Lyme disease, which curtailed most work beyond archiving her older material-- the anthology, the old Bikini Kill albums, re-released last year-- and, by extension, her legacy. “Cookie Road”, the lead track from Run Fast, the new album from Hanna’s project the Julie Ruin, reads less like a “comeback” and more like a who’s who: Bikini Killing by Hanna, Kathi Wilcox, and new members Carmine Covelli and Sara Landeau, synth squiggles straight from Le Tigre, a scatter of cabaret piano from Kenny Mellman of blowsy drag duo Kiki & Herb, all storming the album one after the other like a particularly brisk overture and a rowdy encore in one. To call it “invigorated” would be missing the hyperkinetic point. Add one more member, too: Julie Ruin, the name Hanna took for her somewhat overlooked 1997 solo album. For a defiantly lo-fi project, Julie Ruin had aspirations-- tracks like “Apt. #5” and “My Morning Is Summer” contained the subtle swagger of songs built with enough space to be 10 times larger potentially. Run Fast is that album, to a point.
This is the sound of musicians confident in their legacy and what they can do with it. Parts of it sound like Hanna and company fleshing out the skeletons on Julie Ruin while keeping its samples and experiments: the title track, which is like that 10-times-bigger song realized with 15 years’ gravitas; politely catchy “Goodnight Goodbye”, full of easygoing riffs, marimba sugarcubes, and a core of existential dread to each and every one; the far less fraught “Girls Like Us”, which relaxes atop a “Let the Music Play” synth shimmer and lyrics (stuff girls do: use highlighter pens, have no creation myths, get over it) that practically come with 10,000 girls’ reblogs and doodled cosigns, even if some ("girls like us invented jazz") might be a tad more embattled.
The bulk of it, though, is more disjointed. That's not always a bad thing-- it keeps the band from being an easy tour-circuit rehash, which by now would be entirely possible-- and part of it's Mellman's influence. He contributes vocals and songwriting to much of Run Fast (particularly half-shouted “South Coast Plaza”, which works both as a nostalgic summer jam and manic takedown of nostalgic summer jams), and a lot of the influences here sound like a quick tour through Kiki & Herb’s formidable list of covers. But others aren't new sounds so much as loose ends-- "Right Home", a party track without the story, which makes sense enough in the story but less as a track, or "Lookout", a breather that's inexplicably the second on the album. They come and go, but you can pinpoint their origins a little too neatly.
Sometimes that works. "Ha Ha Ha” is the single it’s hard to imagine Le Tigre actually ever recording this many years into the game, buzzy synths, handclaps, and plenty of words to yell upon other words (“just like Jim Jones was charismatic, you spend your life like an acrobatic!”). And naturally there are a few Bikini Kill singles that could have been: “Stop Stop” and “Oh Come On” are as raucous as anything that group ever recorded, if a little bit at a remove; when Hanna says “sing it on the beat in the new girl style!” the nod’s so overt that you can’t help but notice what she added.
She’s still singing for girls, but different sorts of girls: the girl she was, the girls who are now who she was, who are kindred but unknowable; girls facing mortality, after which “girls” isn’t quite the right word. Those are the girls of "Kids in NY", simultaneously a recognition and a gentle satire (it's a duet, and Mellman plays the role of course-corrector: "There's still a lot to say!"). She’s still writing lyrics to shout back, but there are bitter undertones; the passage of time comes up on more than one occasion, and when she sings “I don’t want to sit around and cry and whine” on “Party City”-- practically a shout-along conga-- she means euthanasia. (It's a reading few of these songs go out of their way to avoid; it's there, in other words.) If it’s the precise opposite of the mood of “Cookie Road,” it still sounds like a victory lap.
